2007-06 – June 2007 Coaching Hour – Improving Scores & Taking a Break

I was enjoying much higher performances in the 80s on occasion; but I’d still go down into those 60s when I had a bad day.

About three months ago I went through another shift. I had a   few weeks at some good tournaments where I had some outstanding performances for me and put together some really good scores. And though my average score has come back down a little bit since then, the worst scores are now low 70s on a bad day. It’s been a jump of not quite ten targets compared to the worst scores in 2006, but it was pretty close, maybe eight targets on this rolling average basis.

It’s really been quite awhile since I had one of those days where   I just walked off of the course and felt like I’d missed everything. I walk off now thinking I’ve done that badly, but I’ll find out I have a 79 instead of a 69. So that’s been a big shift.

When I punched into master class from AA, I knew that I had a good chance to be in contention. It was a lot more about score. It’s a lot less about score now, but I’m finding that the scores have come up on the bottom. Like I told someone at the last tournament, I’m shooting great; but I’m scoring ugly.

And the reality is the bottom scores have been good. I had one bad FITASC. It was the end of a long day. It was very hot, the hottest day that we had yet, and the FITASC was last. The first targets were very far and very difficult. I just couldn’t get any feel on the first parcour, and I walked out with a terrible score. Walking between parcours I said: I don’t have any feel. I’ve got to get my feel back.

I was the worst score on the first parcour out of our squad. Then on the next parcour I was the best score. I got my feel back. And it was just one of those things. I just had to kind of reach down and find it. That’s now been the only anomalous score out of the last two or three months. I lost my feel, but I was able to find it. And while the average score wasn’t that great and it pulled down the overall for that group of FITASC scores, it still is an indication that it is still a higher score than I’ve had as my worst score in about two years.

So that’s what’s happened. If you look at it on the graph, you can clearly see that trend where the worst scores are trending up; and the high scores aren’t getting a whole lot higher, but the range is a lot narrower.

 Gil: Score differential would be a lot less now?

 Brad: It is. If Gary or Greg are on, they’ve seen my spreadsheet so they know all of the statistical calculations.

Gil: If I had seen it, it would only confuse me, I know. (Laughter)

 Brad: I do a consistency score. I give myself a consistency rating. And what has happened is that my shooting has risen right up in the 90-percent range. So it’s really gotten consistent. And that’s happening because these lower scores are just not going in the toilet anymore.   I may walk out with a two on a station, but I’m still doing okay everywhere else. So that’s what I meant when I said I would shoot well and score ugly.

Gil: What do you attribute to that ability to be able to leave that   two behind you and go shoot an eight on the next station? Were you always able to do that?

 Brad: No. It still is a struggle to leave it behind. The ones where there’s a two and the wheels come off and it’s like I lost my feel or something like that. It’s kind of like what happened on that first parcour. If I can just catch my breath somewhere I can do a pretty quick analysis of what went wrong, and it’s usually very simple. I just lost my feel. I wasn’t moving in sync with the targets. Since I know what that’s supposed to be like, I can usually get it back fairly quickly now. So I think it’s the fact that I’ve been through lots of these transitions before and can do that. What still gets to me is when I break the first pair and walk out with a five.

I had on this really difficult course where I think the high overall was a 90 and I had a 79 or a 78, and I had three stations where I broke the first pair and walked out with a five. And I had one station which  I could have run, but I shot it like the guy in front of me instead of my way and walked out with a two. He was about my age. And I thought about my ability. And he shot those targets real fast off of the traps. When I got up there to do it, there was no way. That was not my deal. My first inclination had been to put in modified chokes and just take them when they got out there a ways. But I didn’t do that.

I said: Oh, man, that looked easy. I’m going to do it that way. Sure enough, it was not my way. It didn’t play to my strengths, and I dropped six of those birds.

So I dropped 15 of my 21 or 22 birds right there on those four stations. And so that was tough but I actually find that very encouraging. I walk out of a tournament like that and I feel like it was terrible; and then I look at the score and go: Well, it really wasn’t all that bad, and it’s way above what a bad day has been in the past.

Vicki has got me working on several routines to improve that;  and they’ve been difficult, which is good because it makes me work through those things in the practice sessions.

 Gil: Well, she’s not going to change her mind. (Laughter)

 Vicki: No.

 Gil: I learned that 32 short years ago. If her mind is made up, it’s made up. That’s the way it is.

 Brad: I keep working it.

 Gil: We’re working with quite a few people now who are experiencing the same thing. We had Ron Schaffer on either last year or the year before. We’ve been doing some mental coaching with him on the phone and working with his routines. And I was talking to him the other day. Ron is a very humble, meek person. He’s one of the fiercest competitors I’ve ever run across; but he’s very humble and he’s very caring about what other people think and it’s hard for him to stand up and say: Yes, I did shoot well today.

But he has come around. He’s doing some things with us, and he’s working on his routine. We’ve put the fun back in practice for him, and he is sharing quite a few of the same things that you’re sharing.

His bottom scores are mid 80s now, and he said: I haven’t had a great score like I did last year. But my low scores are five to six birds higher than all of my low scores last year. So I’m a doing better, and I’m still winning first in the FITASC and I’m winning in the prelim and I’m doing this and I’m a doing that.

That’s just the way he talks. But he’s experiencing a very similar thing. But you’ve got to get to that level of consistency where your lower scores are higher than they normally have been. We have seen it too many times. They will push your higher scores up, and it’s just a matter of hanging in there.

Now, you also mentioned to me that some of the tournaments you’ve been shooting here recently have been fairly stiff tournaments, as far as target presentation goes.

 Brad: They have been. I’ve already shot well over 5,000 targets this year; and the course I shot last weekend was challenging. While we’re not seeing higher scores on average, I’m walking away from these things being pretty satisfied with my position in class. For being new in master class, I’m shooting in the bottom third or maybe bottom half.

When I have a good day, I’m getting up in there, and I’m realizing that I’m not that many targets out of a much better performance. To feel that these are the days that I’m coming out with my worst scores is pretty good. I’m building a couple of things here that I can see developing that are very good.

While they’ve been tough tournaments and they haven’t been high scores, I feel like they’ve done pretty well. Two things have happened in the last four months or so. This is the first time ever I got my thousand target, moving average above 80 percent. It’s also first time ever I got my consistency above 90 percent.

So it makes for a very interesting look on the graph to see when these two things come together. In the past when I had high consistencies, consistencies that approached a 90 percent, I was very definitely in a scoring slump, and all of my scores were in the ditch.

And that’s where the consistencies were. So this is one of the first times I’ve seen high consistencies along with high moving averages.

Now, I’m not thinking about this when I get on the course. I’m going around the course and I’m having fun. I’m shooting well. And then I’m coming back and trying to put the score into some kind of perspective and compare it to the performance just as a way to see whether this practice is working or that training is working and what impact it has. As you know, I keep copious statistics so I can look at it a lot of different ways. (Laughter)

 Gil: Yes. You do keep a lot of data. It’s confusing to me, but I’m sure it makes some interesting thought processes for you.

 Brad: Well, what it does, Gil, a lot of times is when you sort of say things like your worst scores are coming up or here’s what happens in a slump, I can go back and look at the data. And you’ve seen it through lots of observation and watching those shooters go through it, and I can absolutely see it in my own experience when I go back and see it.

Gil: Well, it really kind of puts your mind at ease that Gil and Vicki aren’t telling you a lie or blowing smoke. It might be something that could actually happen to you.

Brad: Absolutely. (Laughter)

 Gil: You have had a couple of really good scores this year, I believe.

Brad: Yeah. Right at the beginning of April I had some really outstanding scores. And I think you said it on the last show. Your subconscious takes over and pulls you back a bit from those. And that’s clearly what’s happened, but while that may have happened and I haven’t had the great fortune to repeat some of those performances, I brought all of these worst scores up.

That’s huge, I can feel that. It really builds confidence to know that, I may struggle on these four stations, but I still wound up one or two targets away from the 80s and that would put me in the top half of master class.

 Gil: That’s a big thing, and it’s bigger than most people give it credit for being. We always compare what we do worst to what someone else does best, and that’s one of the toughest things that we do as individuals, not only in our sporting clays career but in life, as well. And that is that we hold onto the failures so much longer as opposed to looking at them for what they are and not letting them become any more than just that and learning from them and go on.

We want to agonize over them, but I will tell you, we’ve seen it so many times, that it helps so much when a person begins to work on a good foundation, like all of you guys are. I feel like coming down to the ranch at the advanced school has helped you a lot every year.

You always come out of that work with a great attitude and a  few more tools for your toolbox. The work that you’ve done on your game has been very good. And when your lower scores begin to rise consistently, there is something really great waiting right around the corner. We’ve just seen it way too many times. It’s just going to be   a matter of time until your whole mind set gets used to that. Then that subconscious of yours is going to all of a sudden take a hold of something. When you want to do it like the guy in front of you did it, it’s going to say no, we’re not going to do that, and you’re going to get those six targets back.

 Brad: Yeah. Each time you work through these various levels, and I still can’t quite articulate what they are. It’s not as simple as beginner, intermediate, advanced. There are very definite levels that you’re hitting, and it may be unique to us individually. You’ve talked about them in terms of score and the various levels that you hit. But every time you hit one of those levels, you have to relearn things.

That’s what’s been so great about going to the 74 Ranch. I go there every year, and I can put the perspective on the level where I am at that point in time. This year, I had a few things that were happening to me that I couldn’t figure out, and now I know exactly why. I don’t have those very often anymore, and that’s probably why these lower scores have moved up so much.

 Gil: I think that’s probably one of the unique things about that weekend down there, is that you eat it, drink it, and sleep it; and some amazing things happen every year down there.

Performing Well with Little Practice

 Gil: I was talking to Gary Davidson. He’s not going to be on tonight,     but I’ve been talking to him. He’s been taking a little time off, which is something that I’m going to talk to y’all about if I have time tonight,   and he has had some unforeseen circumstances occur in his business.   It’s just going crazy, which is a good thing. But he hadn’t been able to shoot very much.

He’s told me this on two different occasions. He said that he had to confess to me that this year he was actually going to do what Vicki and I had recommended that he do and do it exactly like we said to do it, and that was because he didn’t have time to go out and practice and train a lot, but he was still going to shoot some tournaments.

He went out and just shot one target over and over and over and over and over again. He would move the breakpoint a little bit. He didn’t move around a lot, but he was just working on his feel, getting his feel back, working on timing, working on rhythm, and working on breakpoint; and he has had some amazing performances this year with very little training or practice time at all.

Tony Morrow has had the same thing happen to him. I talked  to him a little bit last week, and he was saying the same thing. His business is going crazy, and he hasn’t had time to go out and train a lot. He’s going to some little tournaments here and there. He’s not going to go to the Open this year. He had some very lofty goals at the beginning of the year as far as wanting to do certain things at certain tournaments, but several things have happened to his business, and he’s just overwhelmed.

We had a chat about that three weeks ago and decided that he needed to just back off on all of his goals and get through this very busy time for him and his work. Once he starts seeing the end of the tunnel and he knows there’s not a train coming at him, then we’ll get together and make some new goals for the rest of this year and maybe some goals for the next year.

But Gary and Greg said to me that they were amazed at how well they could perform with very little training and very little practice in both of their instances. I told them both the same thing. It’s a tribute to not only the system that we teach; but it’s also a tribute to the work that they both put in, and many of you other people out there have put in, on working on the basic fundamentals of our system and our game. Our game is not about target presentations. Our game is about basic fundamentals because we do not have the ability to shoot the course that we’re going to be tested on game day. If it were trap or skeet, it would be much easier for you to pinpoint or highlight a mental problem or a physical problem.

I’m not saying those games are easier. I’m just saying because of the control in those sports in that trap is trap wherever you shoot it and skeet is skeet wherever you shoot it, it’s easier to highlight or pinpoint certain areas of your game that you need to work on, and then it’s back to basic fundamentals; but it’s typically easy to fix those because the targets are a known trajectory.

Our game is a game of fundamentals. It’s a game of building a database of fundamentals, and you’ve heard Vicki and I harp on it, and we’ve heard countless students harp on it. I never will forget this. Last year Danny Cummings came down for two days, and he was having trouble with right-to-left crossers.

And I said: Danny, this is right to left. Pull the gun out and lower it a little bit and go left when you see the bird and be early in the breakpoint.

And he hit 15 in a row, and he hadn’t hit a right-to-left crosser that consistently in three or four months.

And he said: Damn it. I came down here to pay for the same information again.

But it is about fundamentals. And these two guys spent a lot of time last year and a lot of time in the off-season working on their fundamentals. It just doesn’t take that much to get your feel back when you spent some time building the house from a good  foundation.

I guess the moral of that story is two things. When you’ve lost your feel, find one target and shoot it until you get sick of it, but build a foundation. And look realistically at who you are and where you are and what you need to work on because our game is a game of basic fundamental foundation and being able to read the target, the pair, know where you’ve got to shoot the first one to make the second one easy and execute the shot four pair in a row, five pair in a row. That’s what our game is about.

I don’t believe that I’ve ever really appreciated it as much as I have this year simply because we’ve written several tips in Sporting Clays Magazine on it; and we found ourselves talking to people all over the country, both on the phone, on emails, and in person, about how if you’re having trouble with a rabbit, it’s not really the rabbit that’s the problem. There’s a breakdown of basic fundamentals, and you’ve got to find out what that fundamental is. It just manifested itself today on a rabbit.

Of course, there are some basic things that we can spot-check on the phone. If you’re having trouble with a certain target, we can give you the three most frequent causes for trouble on that target; but still our game is a game of basic fundamentals. It’s more when you practice and train, about training your fundamental moves on the six basic trajectories.

I wanted to share that with you because Gary was just blown away at how, when he actually just shot one bird the day before a tournament or the practice session before a tournament looking for feel and working on breakpoint, he was actually amazed at how that influenced in a positive way his ability to score well the next day.

It’s like Brad said. You know, when he had that one subpar performance this year on that one parcour in FITASC, he realized that he’s lost his feeling. And once you’ve put the time in that Brad and Gary and Tony and Brian and all of the rest of you guys out there have put in because we’ve beat on you so much to do it. Once you’ve put that time in and you develop that foundation of basic fundamentals, then it’s about feel. That’s why the first chapter in the new book is about feel.

So work on your feel, and we would recommend highly that you find one bird and shoot it, one bird and shoot it over and over and over again working on feel. You need to know the bird is dead before it gets to the breakpoint.

Appointing an Inner Stage Manager

 Gil: Brian, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that you really have settled in the last couple of years on just shooting FITASC is that correct?

 Brian: That’s correct.

 Gil: And as a result of that, your sporting scores, whenever you would shoot them, have not been as good as your FITASC scores; is that right?

Brian: That’s correct.

 Gil: And you embarked on a journey with Bob Palmer of trying to change that and bring your sporting clays scores up, and I’d like for you to at least tell us a little bit about what you’re doing or what you have done and the results you’ve had.

And then, Bob Palmer, you kind of kick in some here, too, from the NLP teaching perspective so that others of us out here can gain some benefit from Brian’s successes.

 Brian: I have really never done well in sporting. I had gotten to an impasse because there are 50 times more sporting events than FITASC and I would like to attend more of them, but I just was not doing well in sporting. So I relegated myself to just shoot nothing but the FITASC because I do so well there.

So I called Bob and told him the problem. And he said: What you need to do is form directors. You need to have a sporting clays director. You need to have a FITASC director or you need to have a skeet director. You need to have a political director. You need to have an advisory council of directors and learn how to shift into those different positions.

Apparently, what I was doing was I had everything in one big ball instead of structuring my mental processes to have different modes. A sporting clays mode and a FITASC mode.

So Bob told me to go and try it out. And so I did this past weekend, and my average scores in sporting are in the low 70s and high 60s and here I am a master class shooter and I shoot in the high 80s in FITASC.

I went to the tournament this weekend; and consequently I wound up shooting an 82 in sporting, which was a quantum leap for me. It’s just how I approached the game this time was totally different than I had before. So there’s something to this.

 Gil: Bob, do you want to explain some of the words that Brian used in his synopsis of how he took your instruction and called up the right part of his subconscious in different places to perform well and not worry about the things that he wasn’t doing at that time?

 Bob P: Okay. Well, to put it simply, everything we do in our lives has a certain mental processing and a certain posture or physiology or whatever you want to describe it. It’s very distinctive to that game or that activity. I’ll give you an example in terms of triathletes. They have to start out swimming. They have to shift into a cycler’s mode, and then they have shift into a runner’s mode. And if you watch an event, you see some people really struggle to transition. The ones who do well make that shift very quickly. It’s almost as if there’s no shift.

It’s a mental and physiological shift that they have to make. But the same thing could be applied to the subtleties between FITASC and sporting clays, so that you’re not wandering back and forth between the strategies for one and the strategies for the other.

It’s about maintaining a completely separate physiology. Even though they’re both shooting sports and the shift between the two are very subtle, you want to maintain that separation.

 Gil: And how would you tell the subtle changes in the physiology between the two?

 Bob P: Well, that’s the difficulty. You don’t know. But your unconscious mind knows. So that is why consciously you can’t do it.

 Gil: Okay.

 Bob P: So you need to set up a situation where your unconscious mind does it for you.

 Gil: And how do you do that? (Laughter)

 Bob P: You call me. (Laughter)

 Vicki: It goes back to cash flow, darling. (Laughter)

 Bob P: Yeah. I’ll describe it to you. It’s very much the metaphor of an actor who performs multiple roles on stage. Actors can shift almost immediately from one character to the next and without skipping a beat. There’s a completely different accent, a totally different posture physiology and it’s done seamlessly. There’s no carryover in accent. An example would be Rich Little or somebody doing one character to the next. He doesn’t ever mix Ford with Lincoln or Ford with Nixon or someone else. We see separate definable characters. You can almost see a separate facial structure and physiology in the character.

So the way actors tend to do that is to have a stage manager to make sure that they shift between roles. So this process is you set up an unconscious stage manager to help you shift amongst those roles that you have.

And we’re not talking just subtleties in two different shoots for us. We can be talking the subtleties between business roles, marketing and bookkeeping and manager and all of those kinds of roles that you have to shift into. Those people who are in business know the kind of shifts that you have to make mentally to wrap your head around those different roles.

It can be helpful to learn to make those shifts in every area of your life. Otherwise you end up being a work alcoholic. It provides some balance. It allows you to step back and pick what’s important in your life.

 Gil: Would it be fair to say that this allows you to concentrate a hundred percent on what you’re doing at the moment even though there are eight other pressing issues around you in your mind? It enables you   to concentrate a hundred percent on this until this is over, and then it enables you to shift from that mind set to a mind set of concentrating a hundred percent on another task without worrying about the other task that you have that aren’t completed?

 Bob P: Absolutely. That’s exactly what it does.

 Brian: I believe in that.

 Bob P: Because when you get a situation where you have multiple tasks all coming at you and all of a sudden, five out of ten of them are a crisis mode, you can get that overwhelmed feeling. But you’ve got to calm down. You’ve got to put this sort of metaphor in place so that only one of those issues comes to the floor and you deal with it.

 Gil: And you deal with it right there and you go on.

 Bob P: Based on your outcome that you have and what you want to achieve.

 Gil: Brian, that helped you a lot, huh?

 Brian: Absolutely. That was the first time I really felt really at ease, and I was very comfortable about what I was doing, and really enjoyed the day. I mean, it was one of my better experiences.

 Bob P: Gil, typically when I do this in the business mode, I will get somebody who will come in and they’ll be having chest pains and shortness of breath because of the work;

 Gil: Let me ask you something: Is the stress at work not totally self- induced because of lack of your ability to do what you’re talking about?

Bob P: Well, absolutely. It’s just so many things are coming at   them.

They’ve overstepped in terms of their abilities. Or they’ve taken on too many tasks because they’re so good at tasks or their boss is giving them new tasks, and they haven’t offloaded other tasks. Right?

The ability to stand back and to put this inner stage director, or one guy I’m working with he calls it his juggler so that he doesn’t have to juggle all of these tasks anymore. Right?

The juggler does it and he just takes one ball and works on it   and completes it and takes another one. If someone gives him a new assignment, well, he knows that he has to give up some of the other assignments. It’s a really neat little package.

 Brian: It’s like if you sit down and write out all of the things you need to do for one organization to the next organization and you go on down the line, it’s just like I had that one step I needed to do. So I focus on that. And then as soon as that’s done, I shifted to the next thing that I have to do and get through it, and the next thing you know, you’ve accomplished everything you need to do for the day.

 Gil: It certainly would guide your idle thought process away from worry and into productive thoughts, wouldn’t it? Interesting. Well, I trust we will hear more about this. I’m not going to let you off of the hook that easy, Palmer.

You and I talked about this when you came to Houston briefly. And Bob is coming down to Houston and is going to spend the night with us next month, and we’re looking forward to that visit and sharing some things that we’ve been doing with things that he has shared with us about NLP and some of the successes that we’re having. We’re looking forward to it, encouraging him to do more and more. And he’s, hopefully, going to have a book published pretty soon. And if the publishers don’t take it, you call me; I’ll publish it.

So, this is something that you had visited with Vicki and I about;   and it certainly makes sense. It’s something that frustrates my wife, but it’s something that I probably do a little bit of. I could do it better, I think, but I’m pretty good at shifting gears and going from one hat to the other hat to the other hat. I want to talk to you more about this, and we’ll do that when we get together.

Thank you, Brian, for sharing that. We’re looking forward to your sporting scores in the next 30 to 60 days and looking forward to your journey in this new exercise with Bob.

And, Bob, thank you for sharing that with us.

 Bob P: You’re welcome.

Take A Break, You’ll Come Back Better!

 Gil: It’s the fifth month of a nine-month sporting clays year that culminates with the National championship on the last day of October and the first two or three days in November.

We talked about this back in January and February. The Open is this week and a couple of you are going to Prague, Czechoslovakia, to shoot over there. But sometime in the next 45 days, you need to take a serious look at your calendar and take some time off. We’re normally used to a seven-month shooting year beginning in February for some of us. If it begins in March for others, it’s a sixth-month shooting year. It’s going to be 60-days longer this year, and I would encourage you to take at least two or three weeks away from shooting.

Take some time off. Go fishing. Go play golf. Go do something, but put the gun down and get your mind off of it. Do something with your family. Do something with your friends. Go on a cruise. Do something, but get your mind off of this game for a while.

Don’t be afraid that you won’t get it back. That’s one of the reasons that we encourage all of you to keep a log. And when you determine when you’re going to take some time off, and when I say time off, I mean time completely off.

I was talking to Gary Davidson yesterday between matches where he was refereeing, and he called and said: Greg and I are refereeing now, and I’ve got to get back together with you to start the second half of my year. I had a great first half and sometime in the first two weeks of July I want to get together with you. Greg and I are going to come over. We’re going to shoot with you for a half a day in the afternoon and half a day the next morning and come back.

But Gary has taken about three-and-a-half weeks off, and he planned that at the beginning of the year like we talked about. We talked about it at the advanced school, and he did his schedule and he’s rested, and he said that he is absolutely ready to get back and turn it on. He’s looking forward to coming over and shooting with me in the next couple of weeks.

So it’s time to take a break. Make it at least two weeks. Three is better. But right now if you haven’t planned your break, before you take your break, plan your startup. Have a day that you’re going to start your break and a day you’re going to end your break. Have a first training session for when you finish your break. Review your log and go back to the beginning of this year and the beginning of last year and look at what you did in your first training and practice sessions and see how many shots it took for you to get it back.

Typically what we have seen is it took you more last year than it did the first of this year to get it back, but last year it was a six-and-a- half-month season or a seven-month season. This year it’s a nine-month season, and I promise you better take a break. If you don’t, you’re going to be burned out by the time Nationals comes around if you’re going to shoot Nationals.

If you’re not going to shoot Nationals, keep shooting and put the gun up in September and pick up your hunting gun and go play. But for those of you who are planning to compete at Nationals, it’s just time to take a break and relax a little bit. Like I said, plan your beginning. Know what targets you’re going to shoot in the beginning. Whether it’s one shot, whether it’s one target, whether it’s a variety of targets, have a good view of what your strengths and weaknesses are before you quit and before you take some time off and write those down. This is a tremendous benefit of keeping a log. As I said, refer to your log to determine when you’re going to practice and what you’re going to practice and how much you feel like you’re going to practice to get your feel back and to get your game back on top. And it won’t take you as long to get it back after a mid-season break as it would when you got it back at the beginning of this year.

Some of you who have been putting in a lot of time on training your basic fundamentals have realized this year that it just didn’t take any time at all to get it back, and that has to do a great deal with the system that you’re learning and the system that you’re using to shoot. It also has a great deal to do with the fact that Bob Palmer has been gracious enough to share his NLP wisdom with us and help push us into performance heights and levels that we never could have achieved. I know that it helped me tremendously, and I know that he’s helped some of you individually; but just him sharing the things that he’s shared with us on the Coaching Hour has enabled a lot of people to perform better, and he’s even gotten some private business out of it. So it’s been a good win for everybody.

Plan your year. Plan what you’re going to do. Plan the kinds of targets that you need to shoot. If you know going in before your  break that you were having a little trouble with some right-to-left presentations, then that just means that you’re going to need to  train those presentations even more when you come back, and try to eliminate that deficit in your basic fundamental game.

However many targets and sessions it took you to get it back at the beginning of the year after a two- to two-and-a-half-week break, three-week break, it’s probably going to take you 30 to 40 percent   of what it did, if it takes that much, if you will have a dedicated, disciplined training and practice session. Carrying your practice to a higher level is something that we talked about a great deal last year and the year before.

If you have a log, you know what you’re supposed to do because all you have to do is repeat what you’ve done before, and you’re going to get better results because your fundamentals will be much better than they were the time before and the time before. So be specific about what you’re going to do and take a break. Reward yourself.

Remember we’ve talked about that almost every year for the last two or three years. Reward yourself for the amount of time that you’ve sacrificed away from your family, away from your jobs, away from everything else because it takes a lot of time to compete at the level you guys are competing in our game. It takes a lot of dedication.

Give yourself a reward. It doesn’t have to be a big thing. It just needs to be something. Without some sort of a reward and a break, your brain is going to get tired of doing it because it needs a pat on the back, also. So take a rest.

Brian, are you going to take a rest after you get back from Prague?

 Brian: Yes, indeed. I’m not even going to pick up the gun for about three weeks. I’ve already got that planned.

 Gil: Good. And do you have a specific practice regiment you’re going to go back to when you pick the gun back  up?

 Brian: Yes. And it will be with singles, for about a week or so, and then I’ll start working on some true pairs again.

Gil: When you pick the gun up, how much of that practice is on long targets and how much of it is on targets within 25 or 30 yards?

 Brian: Well, I really don’t start off on real long targets at first. I’ll just keep everything within 35 yards and just kind of just get to work on feel and making sure my eyes are working good where I’m seeing that target, and that’s my whole key.

When my eyes are really working hard and I’m locking onto it, I’m popping the targets. So I know that everything is working then. And once I get that stare, everything just kind of jells.

 Gil: Do you start off with single targets in the beginning and then go to pairs?

 Brian: Yeah.

 Gil: And when you go to pairs, do you practice testy pairs or easy pairs?

 Brian: Both. I get some that will take you out of your comfort zone; but then I come back to targets that are really coming in your face and the floppers, and you see so much of now and that they dump on you.

 Gil: The kind you’ve got to have to win?

 Brian: Yeah. The ones they give you. If you don’t win, it’s shame on you.

 Gil: Uh-huh.

 Brian: I had some of that this weekend, and I really felt good that I was able to handle them. That was the first time I’ve really felt good that I got those easy ones. That felt good shooting my own targets and fast targets you just don’t appreciate these slow targets at all.

 Gil: Yeah, and training for the International targets. Over in Europe they’re going to throw some targets with a lot of speed, aren’t they?

 Brian: Oh, yeah. I work on that. I got several towers; and then I got targets on machines with big, heavy springs on them. So I got them whipped out, and what have you; but then you’ve still got to come back to that old slow target there because you’ll have a tendency to get way out in front of that target, that’s where you’re going to get burned if you don’t get your eyes locked on it and slow down. And so  I have to learn to make those adjustments.